Matt Wilson: Have Drums, Will Travel
Drummer Matt Wilson must surely be in the running for the title of hardest-working man in jazz. Wilson is a composer, bandleader, producer and teacher. As a leader, his projects include the Matt Wilson Quartet, Arts & Crafts, Christmas Tree-O and the Carl Sandburg Project. He has been in bands with luminaries such as Joe Lovano, ...
Read MoreKenny Burrell: Every Note Swings
Kenny Burrell has appeared on so many essential jazz recordings that jazz history and his story seem irretrievably intertwined. Billie Holiday's valedictory rumination Lady Sings the Blues (Verve, 1956)? Jimmy Smith's epochal funk throwdown Back at the Chicken Shack (Blue Note, 1960)? Tony Bennett's Carnegie Hall debut? Kenny Burrell played guitar for them all. Even Jimi ...
Read MoreBAM or JAZZ: Part Two!
Jazz, an art form given birth in the United States by descendents of the formerly enslaved, has a complicated relationship with race. Although race, as a popular idea, has no basis in biology, many people mentally adhere to the idea of dividing groups of people based on “race" as opposed to understanding how groups of people ...
Read MoreTerell Stafford: Trial and Inspiration
Terell Stafford is as likely to credit his influences as he is to impress his listeners. Coming to jazz comparatively later than many players, and even with his busy schedule as a sideman, leader and educator, he remains devoted to exploring the music's roots, while expressing a relentless desire to learn more.
Stafford first started playing ...
Read MoreLars Danielsson: Love is the Message
Saturday night in an unusually mild December 2011 at Stockholm's premier jazz venue, Fasching, could only mean one thing: the place was heaving. As well as the unseasonable weather and the looming Christmas period, the reason so many festive Swedes were crammed in like tinned herring was to catch a rare glimpse of national hero Nils ...
Read MoreMiles Davis: 1986-1991 The Warner Years
Miles Davis
1986-1991 The Warner Years
Warner Music France
2011
Warner Bros. was trumpeter Miles Davis's last record company, and the five years covered by the five-disc collection entitled 1986-1991 The Warner Years, pale in comparison to the 30-year, 70-disc box set of Davis' complete recordings for Columbia Records, released in 2009. So ...
Read MoreBela Fleck (BEY-Lah Fleck): See Curious, Creative Mind
Béla Fleck has taken his instrument--the banjo--to heights that seemed unimaginable prior to couple decades ago. There have been virtuoso players in its long history, but the sounds Fleck elicits through electronics, and the musical landscapes he treads upon, are groundbreaking.
He's got all that in his pocket. But as a twenty-something musician whose prowess was ...
Read MoreEnrico Rava: To Be Free or Not To Be Free
Freedom, it could be argued, is most deeply understood by those who have been somehow constrained against their will, or who have been prisoners of their own skewed vision of what it means to be free. Trumpeter Enrico Rava knows the meaning of musical freedom; he was part of the free-jazz scene of the 1960s and ...
Read MoreBAM or JAZZ: Why It Matters
Since the last Race and Jazz column, the first of a multi-part discussion with John Gennari--the top scholar on the history of jazz criticism--a firestorm of controversy has arisen surrounding Nicholas Payton's declaration that, to him, the word jazz is dead. He also feels that the word jazz is tantamount to or worse than the “n" ...
Read MoreClaire Daly: The Most Jazz Life I Could Ever Imagine
December 22, 1935. “I am going up the Taku River by dogteam to Fairbanks." “But you can't do that; there are mountains or something you can't get over. Anyway, it's no place for a woman." Thus man disposes of woman. That settled I went quietly about my business of getting ready. Thus begins the journal of ...
Read MoreRez Abbasi: Thoroughly Modern Marvel
Guitarist Rez Abbasi is part of a generation of jazz musicians who came of age after the conservative backlash of the 1980s. He and his peers are making their mark on America's art form by contributing their rich and varied cultural backgrounds and with an embrace of popular culture that was heresy in some quarters for ...
Read MoreTalkin' Blues with Jimmy Herring
Jimmy Herring is a musician who blurs lines, both in terms of genres and roles. Over the past two decades his work with the Aquarium Rescue Unit, Gov't Mule, The Allman Brothers Band, Frogwings, Phil Lesh & Friends, Project Z, Jazz is Dead, and Widespread Panic has cemented his position as one of the world's premier ...
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